Morgana Robinson definitely has something. She was brilliant in House of Fools when she asked Vic Reeves to buff her Barnaby Rudge and now she has her own vehicle.
It’s not her first big break of course. She starred in The Morgana Show on C4 back in 2010. And like that show she plays lots of characters here too. Except that this time they exclusively come from the world of showbiz, a bit like C4’s Star Stories a decade ago or a less grotesque version of Bo Selecta. Or Stella Street if you can remember back that far.
The programme is set up as a fly-on-the-wall documentary about celebrity agency Mann Management, allowing Robinson to play the clients. Now we all know that shows like this can be inconsistent but this one wobbles all over the blinking shop, as Robinson’s Danny Dyer might say.
Some of the impressions are brilliant, though you sometimes wonder if you should be praising the make-up and prosthetics team rather than Robinson. Adele is pretty much Adele from the eyes up, Joanna Lumley is spot-on from the nose down. Gushy Fearne “high five!” Cotton is bang on (it should be by now - she did it back on The Morgana Show). But Danny Dyer sounds like a girl and Greg Wallace’s head is far too small.
Given that this is BBC2 where you ought to be able to be a bit daring, however, the script is blindingly obvious, mostly taking celebrities and giving them something out of context to do. So Danny Dyer writes a children’s book and Miranda Hart (looking like Ken Dodd after botox) decides she doesn’t want to be typecast as a slapstick fool any more so does some Pinter with predictable consequences (nice to see Liam Williams playing her straight man - the supporting cast also includes Cavan Clerkin, Seb Cardinal, Rebecca Humphries, Perry Benson and Gemma Whelan).
In other words it’s pretty route one humour that rarely strays from the expected. The only sketch that really stood out, however, was the idea of the inseparable Mel and Sue (Robinson plays both) living together with Mel’s husband Tim. It’s an idea that writes itself but was performed to perfection. In fact I thought for a moment that maybe it was Mel & Sue it was that convincing. Shame the rest of the programme was mostly half-baked.
Morgana Robinson's The Agency, Mondays from September 26, BBC2, 10pm,
